NEWS

Sometimes we write a track that doesn’t make the cut for one reason or another, creatives changed direction, campaign got killed, clients changed direction, CEO thinks its too edgy, last of the eight clients to review has a brother in a band… etc. We love most of our tracks and feel some of them deserve to be heard. This is one of those tracks.

Our own David Della Santa lovingly crafted this beautiful piano piece for Geometry Global’s Flexjet campaign. It perfectly expresses the elegance and excellence of the imagery. Its more than a simple piano piece. Listen for the subtle sound design nuances in the wind and sky and on the tips of the wings as they soar by your ears.

Linkedin's Creative Studio, with director Doug Walker, created a campaign from a series of member stories. Anna's story (above) is one of them. They were very thoughtful about finding the perfect tracks to accompany these pieces, but they were having trouble finding the best music to help tell Anna’s story. With the editing and music for the whole campaign happening at once, they were running short on time. The producer thought an outside music supervisor might help so she brought me in.

I got the brief, schedule, and budget. They had only a few days before mix and only enough budget for library music. And although it needed to be simple, this piece had to have the perfect emotion and timing for Anna's story. The best way to get the ideal track would be to hire a music house to write several options focused on the brief and revise until perfect. But that was beyond the budget. The right track might be found in a library, but someone might have to listen to thousands of tracks to find it. We needed to have more control over the process and schedule than that.

The solution was to gather a collection of pre-existing tracks from a few tightly focused music resources in my network. I wrote my interpretation of the creative brief and sent it to a handful of composers and music houses that I knew had done work like this previously. I got back a great batch of tracks.

I listened to all the tracks and curated a list of options for the creative team to review. If the creative goal is clear and focused, a reasonable number of options to offer is around twenty-five tracks per spot. That's enough to give good variety and not overwhelm.

In the end, they selected a simple and touching track for “Anna” submitted by one of our composers, Justin Pinkerton at Volume music+sound. They used it as it was written for the long form video and we revised a version for the thirty-second spot.